Most of us, at one point or another, have guiltily caught an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Ostensibly a vehicle for people to sort out their relationship problems, issues with addiction or family estrangements, it frequently descended into chaos: shocking revelations, screaming arguments. Sometimes guests left the show – despite a nebulous promise of off-screen aftercare – looking deeply distressed.

What seemed like harmless entertainment was nothing of the sort – and now the ITV show has been cancelled following the suicide of a guest, its relationship with mental illness has been laid bare.

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“What it boils down to is the glorification of the exposure of raw vulnerability,” says Tony Rao, chair of public engagement at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. “So whether it’s people with existing relationship problems, mental health problems, addiction, poverty [...] they play on these vulnerabilities and feed it back to an audience.”

And this can end up stigmatising people in vulnerable situations. “That is very, very likely to have an adverse effect on someone’s mental health, and to reinforce the stigma surrounding it,” says Karen Tyrell, spokesperson for drug and alcohol charity Addaction. Shame, she says, presents a “huge barrier” when people need help and shows like Jeremy Kyle only exacerbate this feeling for those living with addiction.

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“We work in frontline treatment, and it’s fair to say that these sorts of portrayals are really unhelpful,” she says. “When people are demonised or blamed, it makes it harder for them to get help. They don’t come forward. Services designed to protect them are cut. Policy makers don’t prioritise them. When we put someone on TV and look for ways to say ‘you don’t matter’, we are absolutely failing that person and it hurts us all.”

The Jeremy Kyle Show’s relationship with the mental health of its guests has, as Rao suggests, long been murky. In 2008, Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr went undercover at the show, finding one guest deeply distressed following a hastily-arranged appearance. The young man, Jamie, had been allowed to take part in on-air DNA testing despite suffering from bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia.

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“You should tell the programme makers that,” Cadwalladr told Jamie’s stepmother. “I have,” she replied. Jamie later said that he’d told producers of his condition but that there “wasn’t really a reaction” from them. And, of course, they still put him on the show.

Jamie’s story is not unique. Following the show’s cancellation, one former guest told The Guardian that the abuse he’d faced led him to an overdose: “the show ruined my life”, he said.

And in his 2011 book The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson spoke to a former producer for the show; she said that her team would “assess if [someone was] too mad to come on the show or just mad enough” by asking what medication they were on. Schizophrenia, she said, was “too mad”, though “if the story was awesome, they would have to be pretty mad to be stopped”. If they were on no medication at all, she said, “that probably meant they weren’t mad enough”.

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But even those without pre-existing conditions were at risk. “We’re all human, we’re all vulnerable, especially if we’re goaded and humiliated on a public stage” Rao points out. “If you’re happily parading people in front of a camera for entertainment, you’re either going to create new mental health problems or tip people with existing vulnerabilities into worse mental states.”

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The show’s reliance on stereotyping was a problem not only for mentally ill people but for those living in poverty, too. Rachel Broady is a journalist and lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University; she also leads the National Union of Journalists’ ‘Reporting Poverty’ campaign, which seeks to “challenge the demonising stereotypes in British media”. She describes shows like Jeremy Kyle as “poverty porn”: “they present the misery and chaos created by poverty as entertainment”.

“I grew up in East London in the 70s during the housing crisis and lived, squatting, in derelict housing,” she says. “I know what it’s like to see people you love exhausted by poverty and I know what it’s like to feel condescended to and seen as a scrounger.”

“People have been manipulated into sharing intimate details of their personal lives and then presented like caricatures, sideshow acts, rather than people who are struggling,” she says. “It demonises people, but worse, it alienates us from them.”

“These people are not the enemy of society. Nor are they without skills, experience of work, qualifications, opinions, ideas, talent, worth... they’re just poor.”

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“Fundamentally, shows like this attract viewers because they tap into their beliefs and feelings about people in poverty,” says Abigail Scott Paul, deputy director of advocacy and public engagement at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. “There's a lot of money to be made in giving people the opportunity to sneer.”

This doesn’t just have an impact on the individuals who appear on such shows, either. Both Broady and Scott Paul point to government policies that have demonised the poor – policies that have been justified using some of the same ‘scroungers vs. strivers’ logic of Jeremy Kyle.

It’s no coincidence that the popularity of such shows peaked during the mid-00s – the same time that extensive reforms started to brutally cut back the welfare state. Jeremy Kyle’s bombastic exhortations to guests that they “get a job” were echoed by Ian Duncan Smith’s promotion of a Sun-created hotline encouraging people to report so-called ‘benefits cheats’, with Esther McVey talk about going after the “bogus disabled” in the pages of the Mail on Sunday. The line between media rhetoric and government policy was clear as day.

And how such cuts have impacted mental health is just as clear. Recent research found that discrimination against psychiatric conditions makes mentally ill people more likely than physically disabled people to have their benefits cut; in 2017, the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) blamed welfare cuts for a 50 per cent surge in mental health problems amongst the unemployed. And NHS bosses have warned that cuts to benefits are making people’s mental health problems worse.

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“These things forcefully focus the nation’s anger during times of austerity on the poor,” Broady says. “It’s an effective tool to justify sanctions, underestimate the misery of unemployment, deny the hardship of poverty and suggest that people experiencing poverty are the problem.”

Scott Paul agrees. “The impact here is that people have been driven to destitution. And it was enabled by the majority of public thinking that was the right thing to do because most people on benefits are scroungers.”

With Jeremy Kyle gone, it’s clear that a move away from this blame-heavy, individualistic model of broadcast is long overdue. Programmes that focus on the individual choices and behaviours of guests belie the true nature of mental illness or poverty – issues that are, in reality, deeply entwined with wider social structures and pressures.

And for those shows that do seek to shine a light on individual experience of mental illness? Journalists need to be more sensitive – and less exploitative. “We need people in positions of power to help understand what people’s lives are actually like,” Scott Paul says. “It’s about how we treat each other when we’re put into vulnerable situations.”

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